Oblong folio, 24 x 30 cm, full calf binding. The manuscript is notated in a pre-ruled music book produced by the firm of Longman and Broderip, No. 26 Cheapside and No. 13 Haymarket. The company traded at this address between 1782 and 1798; the watermark of James Whatman the Younger suggests the book was produced before 1794. The inside front cover includes a 20th-century printed paper label "Jane Austen's House/ Chawton Hampshire" and an earlier hand-coloured rectangular paper label, "JANE AUSTEN." The title page features the publisher's engraving of a cherub holding a blank label that purchasers were intended to fill in; this label has been completed in ink, "Juvenile Songs & Lessons," and below this, in smaller writing and what seems to be a different hand, "for young beginners who don't know enough to practise." The title page also features a later ink stamp, "Chawton House/ Alton, Hants." The verso of the title page features a manuscript index to the contents in the same hand as the main contents.

The manuscript consists of keyboard music (solo and duet). The repertoire appears in printed publications from c.1790 to 1810, suggesting that the manuscript was copied from the early to mid-1790s onward. The hand for both the contents and the manuscript index is the same as for CHWJA/19/3, and has been securely identified as belonging to Jane Austen.

A full bibliographic record is available from the University of Southampton Library catalogue.

Ownership and current location: Jane Austen's House Museum CIO, on deposit at the Hampshire Record Office, Winchester, UK.
Literature: Piggott 1979; Gillaspie c.1990; Gammie and McCulloch 1996; Carrasco 2013.

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